


The Riddle Twins

by Cordoue



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Brother/Sister Incest, Evil Twins, F/M, Gen, Mild Incestuous Themes, Possessive Tom Riddle, Psychological Drama, Significant incestuous themes, Slytherin Students - Freeform, Sytherins being slytherins, Twins, World War 2, Young Tom Riddle
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:55:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29286399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cordoue/pseuds/Cordoue
Summary: Tom Riddle knows love very well. How could he not? He was never alone at the orphanage, for she was always by his side, every day and every night. She was there even at the very beginning; indeed, they were created in the same womb. For his twin sister Mary, Tom will stop at nothing to gain the world.
Relationships: Gellert Grindelwald/his war, Tom Riddle/His Sister
Comments: 3
Kudos: 33





	1. Genesis

Some would have said that the nursery of Wool's orphanage was its worst room. Twenty-four wooden cots, each of the same modest make as the next, were regimented in four even rows. The nurses, though outnumbered by their charges, were of longsuffering tempers and thus held always to the principle that no single infant should be privileged at the cost of the next. In turn the infants knew that their screeching and wailing would always magically achieve, though not the complete satisfaction of their impossible desires, at least some form of extraneous relief, even if they had to persist in their squalling for hours. And so, as though from a hellhouse, screams resonated through Wool's Orphanage every hour of every day. All its orphans had long learned to sleep to the endless symphony of newborn rage.

At night, when the lights were turned off and the curtains drawn, the only source of light for the screaming infants was the dim handheld lamp of whichever nurse was chosen to guide them through to the morning. One night, a new and especially young nurse, an energetic, pink-cheeked country-girl who desired fervently to do 'some good' for the nation's most deprived, was given this responsibility. Where most nurses made the rounds with their lamp once every hour, this lively new stewardess went every fifteen minutes.

Whenever she made her rounds, she paused before one particular cot—that one of the gypsy twins. Tom Marvolo Riddle and Mary Metis Riddle they were called, and the young nurse found them as strange if not as reprehensible as their names. They were the only infants that shared a cot, and conspicuously the only ones that rarely if ever cried. These two facts, albeit each innocent in themselves, were regarded together as a particularly ill omen by many of the nurses, and the young nurse was among their number. Thus, perhaps motivated by curiosity, though equally likely by resentment, the nurse took little Tom from his shared cot.

Little Mary started a terrible wail. The nurse went to place Tom, who had also broken into wails, in a vacant cot at the corner of the room.

However, not long after she left, the nurse felt a lurching sense of wrong in her stomach. Something was terribly amiss. It was too quiet. The nursery was never this quiet. In fact, it was never quiet at all. Slowly, as though apprehended by a leering burglar with a sharp weapon, the nurse put down her canteen of hot water, and rose to return quietly to the nursery, conscious that her heart throbbed like a train engine.

With a hesitating hand she opened the door, wincing as the creaking hinges creaked with a loudness that made her feel intrusive. Armed with nothing more than her lamp, she went in.

In his new cot, the infant Tom stood completely upright and completely still, holding the rails, his head turned at an impossible, macabre angle to face the door, his silhouette cast like the gothic statue in the cold cellar of an old cathedral. The young nurse gasped but no noise came from her mouth. Instead, her head began to ache. Her vision went blurry. She stumbled and quickly grabbed hold of a nearby cot, waking a baby to cry. The pain in her head sharpened and intensified, as though there was a knife burrowing in it. She started panting, it was becoming hard to breathe through the nose . . . she'd never had a headache so awful . . . it felt burning hot and heavy like an iron . . .

She ran to little Tom's cot, picked him up, and placed him back with his sister, who jerked her nervously underdeveloped baby arms to hug him. Were it not for the time and place and the souls involved, this reconciliation could perhaps have been called endearing. But the nurse had not seen it anyway; her headache had suddenly cleared and, taking advantage of this little mercy, she fled the orphanage in the dead of the night, never to return.

* * *

The orphans were at a calm, countryside beach. Many of them were excited, if not frantic, as most of them had never seen the sea before. Though the day was cloudy, there was no rain, and as it was a-ways from both summer and Christmas, there were few other people with whom they had to share the scene, only a meek handful of rustic townspeople.

Mary and Tom were now six. They each had healthy heads of unruly black hair, and good-looking faces with sly but guarded expressions. They were permitted to do whatever they pleased without hindrance, for all the other orphans made way for them—something they had learned to do.

As though for a picnic, Tom brought a straw basket, but within it was not food nor drink, but rather an assortment of items that they had collected. Round stones, leaves of different trees, dried flowers, and empty beer bottles from the street. To the uninitiated, there was no purpose whatsoever to these objects. But for the twins it was part of a broader mythos—that whatever belonged to one belonged to both.

They sat on the lawn which overlooked the beach, its sandstone promenade, and the blackness of the interminable sea.

"It goes on forever," observed Mary. "D'you think there's monsters in it?"

"Yes, oh yes," Tom said wisely. "Though there's monsters everywhere. We just don't see them 'cause they hide from us."

"Let's find where they hide."

"We can't go into the ocean," Tom pointed out. "Besides, this is just the North Sea. It's nothing. The monsters in the Pacific Ocean are bigger, more scary. They eat whole ships. Whole fleets."

"Where's that ocean? The Pacific one?"

"On the other side of the world. We'll go there someday. Our father will take us there. He'll take us to see everything, everywhere."

"But what if the Pacific monsters eat our father?" Mary asked gravely.

"They won't," Tom assured, "because they're scared of me."

Mary put her arm around her brother's shoulder and pulled him in. She knew he was right. They never saw anyone, not the other orphans nor the monsters of the world, because they were all scared of him.

"Let's go," Tom decided.

And so they continued their scavenging, hand in hand. They went down the beach, procured seashells to hold to their ear and hear the murmurs of the sleeping Earth, and then deposited them into the basket. At the western end of the beach jutted a few mossy rocks from the sea, each ample enough to serve as a stepping-stone for the curious twins. They went there and stopped to squat down and see; between the rocks were little foamy pools in which tiny white fish swam to and fro. Mary dipped her finger in the water to see if they would bite; instead, they fled.

" _Giantsss . . ._ " hissed a strange, sibilant voice.

Just like the fish reflexively turning away from Mary's curious finger, so did the twins abruptly turn backwards to face their intruder. They found only a small, small snake, of a light brown shade and with a few irregular black stripes, no longer than an adult's forearm and no wider than Tom's thumb.

" _Giantssss,_ " it repeated, erecting its body.

"Giants?" Mary repeated. "D'you hear that, Tom? We're only six!"

" _Ssmall giantsss . . . on thisss water."_

"We're still big for it," Tom agreed. "Can you understand us, snake?"

" _Yesss . . . giant . . . your tongue I can hear . . . "_

"Are you The Devil?" Mary asked quizzically.

" _Devilll . . . "_ it seemed to hiss in confusion. " _I'm sssmall snake . . . you're sssmall giantss . . . the big onesss . . . they're gone . . . "_

"A snake told Eve to eat the forbidden fruit," Mary taught the snake. "But you're not him. You're just a child."

_"Sssmall, yess . . . "_

"Where are your parents?" Tom asked.

" _The wingsss took them . . . "_  
  
"The wings?" Mary asked. "You mean the eagles? Yes, they told us there might be some here, though we haven't seen any."

"The eagles ate its parents," Tom pointed out plainly.

" _Yesss . . . hungry wingsss . . . "_

Mary took another look at the snake, and then at Tom, as though to compare the two. Then, she rendered her verdict.

"Don't worry, we'll take care of you."

Though Tom did not particularly want to have a pet, snake or not, he always assented to his sister's wishes, and so placed the creature in his basket. Indeed, it went with the twins back to London, and both of them were unabashed before the other orphans with their new pet. She was a girl-snake, and thus given the name Metis, Mary's enigmatic middle name. Mary liked to have Metis coil around her arm; Tom, around his neck.

Surprisingly, she thrived in London. In the country as an orphan-snake, she had to compete with greater snakes for food, and was condemned to slither in everlasting fear of overhead raptors. In East London there were no other snakes and the largest bird that could be seen was the pigeon, which was hardly a bird of prey. Moreover, it had become a hobby of the twins to hunt food for her, with a jar they had nicked from a jam and preserves store.

It rained plentifully during autumn, and after showers, rainbows would appear in the sky and slugs would abound on the wet pathways. For Metis, slugs were a delicacy, and for the twins, capturing as many of those slimy creatures as they could was a great amusement.

However, their joy with their reptilian friend was short-lived. One winter day, hardly three weeks before their birthday, everything came to an end.

It began before lunch. The twins, with Metis draped over Tom's, arrived at the table. They sought the leftmost seats where they always sat and from where the rest of the children kept their respectful distance.

That day, however, their territory was occupied. A new orphan by the name of Isaac Booth, a burly teenager of fifteen with a heavy, compressed head and a skewed smile, had dared to usurp their silent throne. Seated around him was a group of shorter boys, all of whose faces were familiar, and all of whose expressions combined excitement with fear.

"Why here they are!" Booth declared firmly, confident in his teenage voice. "The Riddles. I've heard stories about you two. I believe 'ese stories, but only to a point, as they say. Well, why don't you sit down, make yourselves comfortable?"

"Leave our seats," Tom wasted no time.

" _Your_ seats," Booth mocked. "Pray tell then, who gave you the right to them? The snake?"

" _What a nuisance_ ," Tom hissed to Metis. " _I shall have to hurt him_."

Mary, suddenly overcome by protectiveness for her snake, took it off Tom's shoulders.

" _Ssit elssewhere . . ."_ Metis suggested.

None of the boys surrounding Booth understood snake-speech, and so, in their gasping and murmuring and pointing, construed Metis' suggestion as a threat. Booth, however, sat unfazed.

"So it's true," Booth said, with perhaps a tinge of admiration in his voice. "You can talk to snakes. You know that brings bad luck, right?"

"Bad luck for you," said Tom.

"But I s'pose you don't care — they say you're of the devil's blood anyway."

"Don't tempt the devil, then."

For a moment, silence reigned as Tom and Booth stared daggers at each other. Then, to the surprise of everyone, Booth conceded his gaze and gave a smile.

"Alright then Riddle, have it your way."

Booth stood up, slowly turned to leave, and in fact took a step in the direction opposite of Tom—before suddenly turning back and punching Tom in the face.

Chaos ensued. Metis, like a sentient whip, leapt from Mary's arms to strike the older boy's face—and it struck true—only for the older boy to throw it to the ground and stomp on it.

For a moment, the snake laid dormant like a cut yarn of rope on the ground, and Mary, thinking it was dead, screamed—then Booth stomped on it again—which rejuvenated life back into it, but only for it to slide and spring out of the room like a flying fish.

"METIS!" Mary shouted after it before running to pursue it.

Tom tried to chase his sister and their snake, but Booth shoved him back to the ground, his head knocking hard on the floorboards, the bitter taste of blood fomenting in his mouth. _How dare you_ , Tom thought as heat and rage rose to his head. _How dare you!_

He sprang up and, with all the strength he could muster in his body and soul, seized Booth's arm to bite it with the ferocity of a starved feral dog.

Booth screamed with all of his lungs, but he remained in possession of himself, for it took no time for him to punch Tom in the head. The latter, immediately before falling unconscious, thought he had been hit by a huge metal saucepan.

The next few days passed in a blur.

As it was thankfully winter, ice was easy to attain, and ice Tom had to regularly apply to his bruises to prevent swelling. He was told that he'd left a terrific mark on Booth's arm, that from this some believed he had swapped his teeth for the teeth of a wolf, but unfortunately he was unable to behold any of it, his victim having thoroughly bandaged his shame with a grey cloth. Altogether, Tom did not mind his wounds, and in fact they were little compared to the loss of his snake, which was in turn very little compared to the grief of his sister. Mary had not cried since she was a toddler.

"Metis will come back," Tom tried to assure her, though he was uncertain himself. "We feed her."

"She's dead. Dead!" Mary insisted between cries. "In a gutter somewhere, or squashed flat by a car on the road!"

Tom held her tightly in his arms. He had feared that Mary would be angry at him, that she would hold him responsible for their snake's flight, but she had not even a single tidbit of bitterness against him. For how could she? She was precious. It was then that Tom decided he would never lie to her.

"I don't know where Metis is," he said, "but I know we will make Booth hurt for what he did."

Isaac Booth would not have suspected the twins of any malicious designs, as for days and then weeks, they did nothing to him. He and his friends freely occupied the dining room's leftmost seats, and some of the more daring among them wanted him to provoke the Riddles even further. He told them dryly that he had no desire to get bitten again, but the unspoken truth was, he was intensely afraid of Tom Riddle. The scar on his arm, although largely faded, had become permanent. Riddle's teeth penetrated so far into his skin that it was disfigured forever. Moreover, often he had terrible, vivid nightmares from which he would awake covered in sweat, to discover his scar in searing pain, as though it was freshly carved.

And indeed, the activity of the Riddle twins was subtle enough that it went unnoticed not just by Booth, but by all the orphans. In their room, in the lowest drawer of their cabinet, a doll was being assembled. Chicken bones, chewed to the bone, made its skeleton; snake skin made its skin (for Metis had shed her skin five times since her coming to London, and the twins kept each of her discarded skins in this drawer) and, most importantly, Isaac Booth's hair decorated its head. This they were able to retrieve after the older boy took his weekly shower on Wednesdays.

The Lamb, as the twins had taken to calling the doll, was completed in a little over a month. Glue, rubber bands, and wet newspaper enfleshed it to the full. Arranged on the floor before the twins' shared bed, it was the size of a large baby with an exceptionally small head, but with exceptionally many hairs in exceptionally many strange places.

It would be a day of ceremony. On the windowsill, beneath the clear blue sky, was a small mound of breadcrumbs, like a tiny anthill. It was the first point in a trail of crumbs, which went deep into the Riddles' room. The same unassuming pigeon which dined there every morning had no cause to suspect that his hosts would show anything less than their complete hospitality, and indeed for the past two weeks, it had come to familiarise itself with the touch of their human hands—they stroked and even held it, for it knew that they would do no harm to it.

Like two sides of an ancient, broken marble archway, the twins towered over the pigeon from either side and watched it approach The Lamb.

_And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I._

In Mary's hand was a screwdriver which had been sharpened with a butcher's whetstone. Tom's wide curious eyes followed the form of his sister, who stalked slowly and patiently her prey, moving with such quietness and gentleness that it seemed time itself had slowed down.

Then, she struck. With cold, unhesitating force Mary impaled the pigeon's neck from nape through throat. She carved a great bloody aperture through its back in one motion for good measure. Then, she dipped her fingers into the corpse to paint them with blood, and drew a red circle around The Lamb.

The twins stood up in synchrony to behold their work. Mary gestured her bloody hand at Tom to complete the last step of their ceremony.

"You'll do it," Tom told his sister. "Metis was closer to you."

Mary gave a single nod. Then, she stepped forward, raised her right foot and, with all the rage and energy she could muster, stomped down at The Lamb to flatten it to the ground.

At once a piercing shriek resounded through the orphanage, through the entire street in which the orphanage was situated—but it stopped as soon as it came. Then came the clamour of rushed footsteps and murmurs; something had happened, everyone wanted to see. All the upstairs orphans went downstairs, and all the outside orphans went inside. Tom and Mary followed the throng.

There, on the leftmost end of the table, was a horrific sight that would scar many of its beholding orphans for life. Like a puppet violently thrown against asphalt, Isaac Booth lay disfigured on the floor, covered in blood and splinters from the chair upon which he was previously seated and which appeared smashed into hundreds of pieces. Blood covered his face and blood flowed from the inexplicable ruptures in his clothes; but all of this was nothing—nothing—compared with the lower half of his body. His legs, from thighs downward, were completely _squashed,_ like pumpkin in a mortar for a pie. In place of them was the bloodied wood of the floor-planks, discoloured like a tree who survived the decimation of his forest, but was cursed with bearing the blood of all its kindred.

Even the senior nurses that rushed to the scene broke into hysterical screams upon beholding the ghastly sight. They sounded like the infants of their nursery; their cries were without hope, without moderation, primal and despairing. And who could blame them? None of them had ever seen anything like this. None of them would have thought it possible.

Far from them in the back of the crowd stood the Riddle twins, whose notoriety would, like Gavrilo Princip's in the month preceding the commencement of the Great War, rise to new dark heights in the weeks to come. There, behind the dozen shocked, numb faces of terrified orphans, a little smile curled on Mary's face, and her dark, delicate eyes glimmered with a joy that would have, in any other place and time, appeared innocent and deeply endearing. She looked as though she was lightly amused by a child's silly joke. It was this little expression, the seat of which was her mirthful, dark eyes, that Tom regarded with a full heart, and it would be these eyes which, in years to come, would utterly enthral many a boy to dreamfully imagine her as kind, intelligent, loving, maternal, angelic, and it was so tantalisingly charming, and even true, that they would forget who she truly was—a Riddle, more powerful and pitiless than they could possibly conceive.


	2. A Theatre of Smoke

Isaac Booth lost his mind with his legs. After months at a hospital, he briefly returned to Wool’s Orphanage with wooden stumps in place of knees, and with two unwieldy crutches always under his arms. But he could not stay. The younger boys who once revered him now avoided him like he was the carrier of a deadly disease, as though anyone seen by his side was certain to suffer his fate. But loneliness was a trivial problem compared with the _pain_ , and the pain never went away. Not with _them_ there.

Whenever either brother or sister of the Riddle twins came close to Isaac, his legs, or what remained of them, would be engulfed in hurt. _It’s what we call a_ _phantom limb_ , the doctor told him, _a trick of the mind that will fade with time_. Yet for weeks he would, whenever in proximity to the Riddles, scream in pain with all the might of his weary lungs, reliving again and again and again that satanic day months ago. Often he screamed at night, and though some of these screams were from nightmares, many of them were not—sometimes, he felt a dark, undead presence outside his door, and cold fear would overcome and immobilise him in silent, torturous wakefulness for hours. 

It was not only Isaac who was sick of himself. Whenever he screamed at night, many babies of the nursery would wake and wail, and in turn his suffering contagiously became the suffering of the nurses, who grew visibly more weary as the days and weeks passed. The other orphans either pitied or despised him; he liked to be subject to neither. And so, one day, he had a very serious talk with Mrs. Cole, during which he feigned more brain-sickness than he really had, and she granted him his request—for the rest of his life he would be committed to an asylum, where no one had the wits to feel sorry for him.

In its entirety, the tale of Isaac Booth had elevated the reputation of the Riddle twins from the shadow of mysterious ominousness to the full light of living terror. They were once strange, quiet gypsies who had a language of their own; now, they were demons hiding in plain sight. This suited the twins, not that it was particularly important—the important thing that Booth imparted unto them was the awareness of their own power. Indeed, after Booth’s ruin, their power only grew and grew.

By the age of nine, they could unlock any locked door simply by twirling their fingers twice anticlockwise before the knob. They became burglars, first of chocolates and smoked sausages and sugary fruit juices, and then of houses and their furniture and books, with which they furnished their own bedroom. Mrs. Cole asked no questions; it was better that they stole from outside the orphanage than inside it.

By the age of ten, they were able to control small animals through looking at their eyes. For sport, they deployed spiders, rats and all sorts of pests against the other children, in retaliation for the smallest perceivable slights, such as being ‘looked at wrong’. However, this enterprise was given up firstly because it grew mundane over time, and secondly because the twins had no wish to provoke the increasingly agitated Mrs. Cole to truly drastic action. They feared the asylum to which Isaac Booth had been consigned.

Upon turning eleven, the magical developments they had made in the year previous became too numerous to innumerate. Perhaps the most noteworthy development was that of their minds and sensibilities. Theft had, as an activity in its own right, become dull for them, though they still stole whatever they needed. Instead, the twins, now tall, long-legged, and beautiful in colourful, overlarge clothes they had stolen from the houses of the rich, often dwelled in the many parks of their city, picking flowers and transforming them into flying blossoms, remotely guiding paper boats over tranquil lakes, and making small, tantalising bonfires at night with nothing but sticks and discarded newsprint.

Indeed, when it was temperate enough, they stayed entire nights in parks and cemeteries, with nothing but blankets and each other for company. As for cemeteries, the Riddles had developed a taste for morbidity, when the possibility occurred to them that their father might have, like their mother, already died. And they knew Tom Riddle was his name. 

It was in the Abney Park cemetery that they first comprehensively searched for him. Abney Park was a grand place; it was also what was called an arboretum, or a place where many trees of varying sizes and places of origin were arranged to impress a sense of natural awe. The twins liked to call it a ‘rainforest’, albeit London was much too cold to be considered environmentally tropical. Nonetheless, it was in this cemetery that the twins often discussed their father.

“I like to think he died long ago,” said Mary, who sat irreverently on a rich man’s gravestone, her long legs sprawled over his plaque. “‘Cause if not, he’s no excuse for leaving us here.”  
  
“Maybe he doesn’t know we’re here,” reasoned Tom, who lay on another grave, surveying the great overhead interplay of windy leaves under the cloudy grey sky.

“But he surely knows we’re somewhere at all,” Mary maintained, as she twirled her finger to spin a stick midair. “And if that’s how it is, he should’ve found us already, were he alive — he’s had eleven years.”  
  
“He knows we’re somewhere at all,” Tom assented, “but he doesn’t want to see us. He didn’t like mother — he’s no reason to like us.”  
  
“Mother died ‘cause she didn’t have our power,” Mary noted tonelessly. “Perhaps, _if_ he’s alive, father thinks we’ve not got power either.”  
  
“Then, _if_ he’s alive, we’ll have to prove him wrong.”

It was for this power in question that the twins spend most of their time outside the orphanage. Though their bedroom had grown homely over the years, with nicked furniture whatnot, it became suffocating as they began to feel themselves too large for it. The whole world ought to be their canvas, not just a room. Yet they still prized it, this inadequate canvas for their power, not so much as a home, but rather a vault of souvenirs for everything they had done together over the years. It was the heart of their past. 

Thus, when they returned to there and found a man with a long auburn beard seated on the only chair they owned, nothing less than the putrid feeling of having been _found out_ , overcome, and invaded overcame the twins. Indeed, this man, whoever he was, was in the centre of everything. They had, among innumerable other belongings, a shelf with stolen jars of chocolates and candy; a bookshelf with books stolen only from houses burgled (not libraries, whose books were battered and old); and a table with three ceramic vases they took from a museum, in which an improvised bouquet of flowers they picked from an unwitting rich woman’s garden rested. There was a reason why even prospective parents were not allowed in their room—but this man had seen it all.

But what really inflamed their unease was that the man had seen their bed. It was a single bed, they shared it, and upon it two pillows intimately crammed together, much like they who slept on it did every night. They knew that they were the only orphans who shared a bed, a custom they had for long as they could remember—and that man, whoever he was, was not supposed to be privy to this secret tradition.

So very naturally, the first thing which Tom said to this man was, “we do not wish to be adopted.”  
  
“Well, I am not here to adopt you,” the man smiled. “My name is Albus Dumbledore, and I am a Professor of a school — a very special school, as you shall see —”  
  
Mary, always there to reinforce her brother, interjected. “We do not wish to go to school.”  
  
“No, perhaps not,” the Professor accepted. “But I’ve reason to believe you shall be quite glad to come to mine —”  
  
“A _special_ school,” Tom accused. “D’you take us for fools — you’re from the hospital, aren’t you?”  
  
“He is — that’s why he’s all formal-like!” Mary affirmed, clasping her brother’s hand. Then her tone suddenly softened, “with all respect, sir, you shan’t take us. We’ll run and disappear — then they’ll accuse you of having made us run!”  
  
“No, no,” Professor Dumbledore said patiently. “You will be at liberty to do what you please, I shall not force you to do anything nor go anywhere — only tell me this — have the two of you not done things, extraordinary things, that your peers would have found strange, impossible, or even frightening?”  
  
It was not the first time such a question was posed to the twins, but it was the first time that such a question had been posed in a graciously curious manner rather than a critically superstitious one. Indeed, as the twins exchanged looks, they privately agreed that there was something in this man they had to unravel—and so they entertained his question.

“Perhaps so,” said Tom. “But what’s it to you? Why should we tell you?”

“Because,” Dumbledore began slowly to commence his grand revelation, “what you have done, and will continue to do, is _magic_. You see, very few people in the world have magic — it is only natural that the few of us who do are seen as strange by the rest.”

“Magic . . . " Mary repeated in a murmur. “It’s magic that we can do?”

“Well, what can you do?”  
  
Tom and Mary, each with wide bulging eyes, shared a look between which, like glowing moss fermenting between two rocks, emerged an understanding they both knew the other also understood. Their power was not an aberration in an inferior world, but rather the sign of a superior one—one which this Dumbledore would have to introduce to them.

“All sorts of things,” Mary began. “We use and learn our powers together.”

“We can make paper airplanes fly without falling,” Tom added.

“We can make paper boats sail in any direction that we like.”  
  
“We can set matches on fire with our fingers.”  
  
“We can snuff candles by looking at them.”  
  
“We can make dead flowers bloom.”  
  
“And we make animals play dead without training them.”  
  
“We can unlock any door without a key,” said Tom, gesturing vaguely at all the stolen furniture and in their room. “That’s how we got all this.”  
  
“We need it more than the people to whom it belonged,” Mary nodded. “We’ve never hurt anyone.”  
  
With this, the twins went silent and awaited the response of Dumbledore, who had uncharacteristically gone rather silent. This silence prolonged a little while, a few seconds perhaps, as Dumbledore appeared to unravel a ball of yarn in his mind, before his eyes became clear and he asked the twins:  
  
“Are you sure that you’ve never hurt anyone?”

“Only ever to protect ourselves,” Mary proclaimed.

“But what of everything that you have stolen?” Dumbledore asked, without giving them a chance to respond for he immediately continued, “to steal is to hurt — to take someone's possessions against their will is still to wound them — indeed, one can wound without hurting the other’s physical body.” 

Tom furrowed his brow. “And who are you to call us thieves? Do you even have magic yourself?”  
  
“I am a wizard, Tom,” Dumbledore explained. “Just as much as you are.”  
  
“Prove it.”  
  
As though to ask, _do you really dare me to do this—?_ Dumbledore lowered his head and rested his inscrutable blue gaze at Tom. Then, he turned away, and for a moment Tom ventured to victoriously believe that Dumbledore would confess that he was not really a Professor of the wizarding school, but merely a mundane representative of it, here to escort Mary and himself to their proper station in life. But he had thought wrong, terribly terribly wrong.

As though to lift up an invisible rope, Dumbledore hoisted his arms upward, and a smouldering red ring of fire erupted on the ground—exactly upon the same circle that Mary drew with pigeon blood to make sacred The Lamb nearly five years ago.

Needless to say, the twins each shrieked and recoiled in shock. Professor Dumbledore’s authority established itself with a hot brandishing iron and, moreover, they were truly found out.

“At Hogwarts, you shall learn not only how to do magic, but also how to control it. Our Ministry — yes, we have a Ministry — has rules concerning how magic may and may not be used. To use magic with ill intent is forbidden, not just for the sake of others, but also for the sake of oneself.”

Dextrously moving his fingers as though to play an invisible piano or to puppeteer a familiar puppet, Dumbledore made the coal-black smoke that billowed from his ring of fire coalesce into four rectangular forms on equidistant points on the flaming ring, like four points of a compass. They then refined into four distinct humanoid shapes; three men, and one woman, all of whom appeared to wear strange, long dresses while warily wielding sticks in their hands.

“Yes,” Dumbledore said in a low voice. “I know what you did — but since you didn't know better at the time, I shall pardon you this once — but know that no magic of that sort will be permitted at Hogwarts. Students have been expelled in the past for smaller infractions.”

The figures of smoke, as though they had all just woken from inteminerable slumbers, watched their own arms as they tentatively stretched them.

“You see, magic is a living thing. Just as the two of you shape and are shaped by each other, so is every mage the shaper and shaped of their magic. When one casts a spell, elements of their soul — which in common vernacular we can best describe as love or hate — as well as the more particular designs of their mind — the will to strengthen or weaken, to comfort or or terrorise, to make more beautiful or ugly — all of these fuse and breath new life back into you.”

Swaying his hand as though to ceremonially shake sand out of his palm, Dumbledore made his smoke-figures truly come to life. Though there was no noise but the crackling of the fire beneath them, they appeared to talk, and then disagree, before breaking into _fight_ with their small sticks, each of which conjured mighty missiles of black mist. Two of the figures, both of them men, appeared far, far more adept and powerful than their two counterparts, another man and a woman.

“Come closer,” Dumbledore murmured vacantly. The twins were unsure if he was addressing them or his figures of smoke, but they heeded his instruction. “Behold there two wizards of immense power, but of even greater folly — see how they ignore the other two . . . Does it surprise you that these other two are indeed the siblings of the first great wizard? The sister is talented, but her magic is unruly and indeliberate as she is, and so her power is more in potential than in reality . . . and her brother, the ordinary one, loves those he ought to love with much ardour . . . ” 

“As you can see, he hasn’t a great stock of spells nor strength in him — but he is in control at least of his own magic. He does everything with clarity — he seeks only to protect his more vulnerable sister, his dear sister who, despite her prodigious power, cannot protect herself.”

“For years, the two powerful, prideful wizards were the best of friends, and together, they thought themselves living Gods on this Earth. Together, they set rivers on fire. They solved mysteries of magic that had been unanswered for centuries. They spawned new forms of life from their wands as though they were tossing breadcrumbs to pigeons, and they tamed thunderstorms just so they could lie together atop the clouds to gaze at the stars.”

“But this was not enough for them. They had already pushed the boundaries of ordinary magic to its limits; they wanted to push the boundaries of _all_ magic. They told themselves there was no such difference between dark and light magic, between good and evil magic, yes, they truly believed they had the power to bring the sun into the night, and the moon into the day — they said to each other there was no need for humility when one had power. And so they drew on all the blind, dark underbelly of their souls — hate, unbridled desire, and bloodlust — to create horrors and living nightmares, which they called greatness.”  
  
“They thought they were invincible and invulnerable, least of all to their very own powers — but it was their power that corrupted them. The spells they cast, the phantoms they conjured — these controlled them more than they controlled these."

“One of them was a single child, while the other, as you can see, has a brother and sister — and it was they, these siblings, who sought to convince their brother to abate on his path of destruction. His counterpart detested this, he thought that nothing ought to keep his soulmate bound to Earth, as he liked to say — including his very flesh and blood. Indeed, the other great wizard had grown, with his magic, so maniacal and possessive that he could not tolerate the idea that his fellow demigod might be kindred to ordinary creatures — and so ensues all this . . . ”

Indeed, the two great wizards in their miniature forms of smoke put up a tremendous, terrifying show. Tom and Mary who had never done any magic nearly of this calibre before watched it raptly, as though they were beholding the real scene which it imitated. That the two smoke-wizards harnessed great power over gigantic forms—here something like fire, there something like water, but all in representative smoke—told beyond a doubt that they ought to go to the Hogwarts of which Dumbledore had mentioned. 

Suddenly, in the midst of the grand choreography of black smoke, red fluid emerged, first slowly, like water aimlessly floating in oil, before gushing forth in a splatter like a spurt of blood on both the twins. They reached to cleanse their faces, but found that the blood had already dissipated. Returning their focus to the battle of smoke, they found that one of the combatants had completely disappeared—the great wizard without the siblings—while the other great wizard hunched over something red and bloody, almost like a feral animal hunching over its maimed prey.  
  
It was his sister, and there was no mistaking her, even as a simulacra of smoke—she was dead. The other wizard gestured irately at his great brother, but the latter seemed not to notice this—it seemed that in that moment, his entire universe was the lifeless form of his sister.

“Now you see,” concluded Professor Dumbledore, his tone quiet and clinical. As though to dismiss a fly he waved his hand to dismiss the smoke and fire. “Come closer, stand here — and here.”  
  
The twins, numb in expression but frenzied in their thoughts, obeyed the Professor to stand very closely together facing each other, so that each comprised almost entirely the field of vision of the other.

“You love each other very much,” the Professor noted. “In the absence of parents, you have come to love each other not just as brother and sister, but also as father and mother — few in the world, even the magical world, understand the love that you have.”

“You act and exist in unison, in harmony — the bond you have is the sapling of an ancient tree, fresh and beautiful and with the potential to become a mighty force for good — but it is still very young, very fragile — it must not only be protected, but also nurtured. In magic, what you do is what happens to you. So I must tell you this, for your sakes as much as mine, to refrain from the path that this pair of prideful wizards took . . . Refrain, dear Tom and Mary, from the darkness — if not for yourself, then for each other.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of you may be wondering how often I will update this fic, or what plans I have for it broadly. I am not sure how often I will be able to post updates — the academic year ahead of me is going to be very busy, and it appears that the extracurricular obligations in my life will likely compound during it as well. That being said, I have put a great deal of thought into this fic (I have mulled over these characters and many others in their universe for well over a year now), and have conceived innumerable potential plots, subplots, themes, etc, many of which have been discarded, but enough of which I like enough to think adequate for a story. 


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